Remains of the Day: Talking smack

Michael Dell and HP go head-to-head on the PC industry, Lenovo throws down the gauntlet in the tablet space, and it’s The People vs. Apple on censorship. The remainders for Monday, August 22, 2011 talk the talk and walk the walk.

After news broke last week of HP selling off its PC division, Dell CEO Michael Dell traded barbs with HP via Twitter. This is like watching two dinosaurs argue about what to have for dinner while a giant meteorite is hurtling towards the Earth. If, you know, the dinosaurs had had a social-networking site.

Speaking of snarky shots, Lenovo’s CEO Yang Yuanquing leveled a broadside at Apple by saying the company “only covers the top tier” when it comes to tablets, thanks to its $500 price tag. Of course, right now it also seems to cover the “people who want to buy a tablet” tier.

Apparently, iOS 5 contains a special feature for Japanese users: earthquake warning alerts. It’s part of a national system launched in 2007, and which has already been deployed to other handsets. Frankly, having this as an alert option would probably make me nervous every time I got a text message.

An Internet grassroots organization has amassed thousands of signatures to protest an Apple patent for a technology that could remotely disable iPhones’ cameras during concerts. The concern? That anti-democratic forces would use the technology for nefarious purposes. The organization delivered the petition and its more than 25,000 signatures to an Apple rep this week, cleverly packaging it in a MacBook Pro box. (Note: 25,000 signatures printed out on paper are actually heavier than a MacBook Pro.)

Evernote 4.1.0 - The latest update to the ubiquitous note-taking app for iOS adds support for rich text styles, lists, and links to notes; the ability to edit existing notes with simple styles; redesigned screens for creating new notes and editing new notes on the iPhone; access to shared notebooks; searching within individual notes; a redesigned UI for the iPad, including pinching and zooming into the note list and support for multi-selection of notes; and more. Free. Some features requires iOS 4.2 or later.

Shredit X 6.0 - Mireth Technology's secure file-erasing software for Mac OS X has been updated to version 6.0, bringing support for Mac OS X Lion. $25 for a single license; Shredit 5 users can upgrade for free, while registered owners of previous versions get a 25-percent discount.